Times's grumbles grow

12/29/11 7:45 AM EST

Four days after disgruntled New York Times staffers sent an open letter of frustration to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the "Save Our Times" campaign had amassed 270 signatures in protest of the Times's decision to freeze some employees' pension plans, per the initial report from Huffington Post's Michael Calderone. Two days later (as of this writing) they're just short of 400 signatures.

One early interpretation of the SOT list, suggested by one reader, was that it provided evidence of divides at the paper between older, print-only journalists and younger, Web-based reporters. Those divides do exist at the paper, according to my conversations with Times staffers, but the Save Our Times cause seems to transcend them. There are at least 11 Web producers on board at this point, and a whole host of younger reporters, some of whom signed on very early.

That's not to say there aren't younger reporters who are angry about getting caught up in a public debate over pensions that they weren't worried about in the first place. But the overall takeaway, this many signatures in, is that the paper's pension grunts are backed by a wide — and growing — swath of employees.